The increasing amount of motor vehicles on the roads around the world is a topic of concern. The on growing numbers of vehicles have created a major parking problem worldwide. The present situation in most major cities is a severe shortage of parking spaces and high parking fees. Since every country has a law providing disabled parking permits that allow persons with either long-term or temporary mobility impairment to park in designated handicapped parking spaces (and in places that parking is normally forbidden to the public) at all public and private facilities, parking permits are being forged or abused by the falsifier in order to gain a convenient and free parking space. For example, a phenomenon of abusing disabled parking badges is taking place in the form of using a handicap badge by other unauthorized family members, or other forgers as well as using a handicap badge of a person who desisted.
The present official issued permit tags consist of the widely used wheelchair symbol which is usually printed on a tag or a badge made of plastic or paper, making it easy to copy and fake. In order to save parking fees, forgers are used to park in places that are forbidden for ordinary people but are allowed to handicapped people. As a result, municipal authorities around the world are losing an enormous amount of income as a result of the situation where a substantial percentage of the handicap parking is in fact done by forged parking tags.
Furthermore, If forgers sometimes make a high-quality copy of a genuine parking permit, such that a parking officer inspecting a fake parking permit will find it hard to distinguish from a genuine one. Even if the parking officer is suspecting a fake parking permit, in most cases the officer has a cumbersome way or even has no way of verifying the suspicions and validating if the permit is genuine. Thus, a parking permit forger benefits a free and convenient parking space from the present situation with practically very small chances of being caught in his felony, leaving the needy person without a parking space as the law requires. As a result, persons with handicap parking tag are forced to park their cars on sidewalks, bus stops or near fire taps, making the public environment disordered and dangerous.
In the prior art, several attempts where made in order to prevent from unauthorized drivers or vehicles to occupy a parking place dedicated to handicapped persons, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,476,338, which discloses a barrier apparatus. However solutions of this sort require complicated structures to be built in the parking place. Furthermore, it is limited only to specific parking places, where in some countries, such as Israel, vehicle carrying legal handicapped tag can park almost everywhere.
Some others prior art relates to improvements in the parking permit, as in US application No. 2008/0209781 which discloses a display device of disabled parking permit and in U.S. Pat. No. 6,819,262 which describes a parking indication sign for vehicles of disabled persons, in order to avoid parking near the door of a vehicle of a handicapped person. However, both inventions cannot assure the parking permit is not abused by an unauthorized person.
Other prior art relates to systems for identifying parking violations with no correlation to handicapped parking permits, such as U.S. Pat. No. 5,343,237 which discloses a system for detecting an illegally parked vehicle using a TV camera, and U.S. Pat. No. 6,559,776 which describes a parking status and control system using a vehicle presence detector and a parking meter.
It is therefore an object of the present invention to prevent handicapped parking permit of being forged by providing a system and an apparatus for electronically identifying and clearly distinct a permitted driver or user of a motor vehicle who is parking, from a non-permitted one.
It is a further object of the present invention to identify a permitted person specifically, e.g. the handicapped person or his authorized representative, in real time parking.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to prevent the forgery of a disabled person's permit.
It is yet a further object of the present invention to distinct between a permanent permit and from a temporary one.